André Leon Talley On L’Wren Scott and Daphne Guinness’s Dinner

John Currin and Rachel Feinstein arrived at the same time as yours truly to L’Wren Scott and Daphne Guinness’s dinner at the new Romera restaurant at the Dream Downtown Hotel on West 16th Street. I’ve always been a big fan of Scott’s, ever since she designed the wardrobe for 1996’s Diabolique with Sharon Stone. One year during the Milan shows, when the airline lost my luggage, she loaned me her beige pup tent–sized Lanvin raincoat. As large as it was, and as gracious a gesture as it was, I could only roll it up and wear it as an oversize muffler.

“John and I had this conversation about how an artist grows old and reinvents himself,” said Feinstein, who had just come from Marc Jacobs’s show. “I find Marc and John similar as they both are the same age, and I see parallels in their ability to tap into the lost innocence of childhood. Marc always reinvents his fashion, renews it, and that’s what an artist does.” She finds it hard to imagine designers who must “snap”—or have creative moments—six to eight times a year for collections. “John and I snap every two or three years for a show!”

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Photographed by Brian Nordstrom

Feinstein was wearing Scott’s ruby sheath dress and new burgundy velvet slingbacks on a heel that simulated Bakelite, while Ellen Barkin was in a court pump from the designer’s first collection and a short pencil sheath dress. Wendi Murdoch, who came in a pink dress and neon green nails, was seated next to Steven Klein at one of three tables. Scott, in a white embroidered slim Madame Gin Sling dress, hosted one; Guinness another; and Mick Jagger hosted Calvin Klein at the third. An early gate-crasher was Courtney Love, then newly platinum blonde Lindsay Lohan, who seemed content sitting in Siberia, away from the invited guests.

Scott, ever the conscientious hostess, kept dashing to the kitchen to check in on what would be a Salvador Dalían surreal dinner. The menu, arranged by Spanish chef/neurosurgeon Miguel Sánchez Romera, was a series of minimal delights, each course accompanied by shot glasses of some concoction like, say, garlic water with tomato or vanilla and wild garlic aroma. There was a course called Isis of vegetable tiles smaller than Chiclets arranged in a checkerboard pattern on a square plate. Aprilis was puffs of mousse made from seaweed and shellfish with daikon radish and flower petals that looked like two pieces of Turkish delight in the bottom of the bowl. The tastiest course, Iocondus, was New York strip with black truffles, cooked at the table on what looked like incense burners from a Rajah’s palace. (Because they were the size of Fiber One brownies, Jagger admitted to having three during his toast to Scott.) As the dinner unfurled like a lotus blossom over two hours, Currin, Feinstein, and I could not help fantasizing about White Castle hamburgers, meatloaf, and macaroni and cheese. The best part was dessert: strawberry, kiwi, mango, and blackberry sorbet over lychee mousse with white chocolate.

I’d missed Scott’s show earlier in the day, but Jagger assured me that the collection had some of the most beautiful dresses he had seen of hers. At 12:30, people rose to say good night, as Vlad Doronin arrived with Tony Shafrazi, but sans Naomi Campbell, who had taken off to London for Fashion Week there.